Mesothelioma Prognosis

Mesothelioma prognosis depends on how early it is diagnosed and how aggressively it is treated. However, the prognosis for malignant mesothelioma usually disappointing, although there have been some modest improvements in prognosis from newer chemotherapies and multimodality treatments. Malignant mesothelioma Treatment at earlier stages has a better prognosis, but the cure rate is very low.

Various factors that play role in mesothelioma prognosis:

• How early it is diagnosed and how aggressively it is treated
• Tumor size
• Tumor location
• Metastasis
• The extent of mesothelioma symptoms
• Asbestos exposure periods
• Mesothelioma cell types
• Epithelioid Mesothelioma
• Sarcomatoid Mesothelioma
• Biphasic Mesothelioma
• Patient’s age

There are prognostic factors that allow some refinement of prediction of life expectancy. Apart from non-epithelioid histology the most important poor prognostic factors are male gender, advanced stage disease, poor performance status, leucocytosis and thrombocytosis. Several scoring systems (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), Cancer and Leukaemia Group B (CALGB)) have been used extensively in chemotherapy trials and have been validated as useful in estimating survival.

The minority who survive more than 3 years are almost exclusively from the epithelioid group. Distant metastases occur commonly, although they are usually late and seldom cause problems.

Main article - Mesothelioma Screening